Press

Camino Mortera, of the Centre for European Reform, a research institution, said the Spanish government’s attempts to interfere in the composition of the judiciary had worrying overtones of events in Poland and Hungary.Warsaw and Budapest have muzzled the independent judiciary in moves which have concerned the European Commission and civil rights groups.“Given what is happening with Poland and Hungary, just a mere suspicion that a government is trying to intervene in any way in the composition of a court through emergency legislation raises suspicions,” she told VOA.

The BCC’s call for action from the government came as research from the Centre for European Reform (CER) thinktank claimed Brexit had shaved 5.5% off GDP and cost £40bn in tax revenues.In a report, the CER’s John Springford compares Britain’s performance since Brexit with a basket of similar economies.

This week’s chart comes from the latest assessment of the effects of Brexit (up until June 2022) by John Springford at the Centre for European Reform think-tank. The headline number is a 5.5 per cent (£33bn) negative hit to GDP in the second quarter of 2022, when compared with remaining in the EU single market.

The Centre for European Reform’s latest assessment, to be published shortly, which compares the UK’s performance with a “doppelganger” UK of similar countries but unaffected by Brexit, is expected to report significant negative effects on both exports and business investment.

So now we know. Brexit is proving even worse for the UK economy than the official forecast of a 4 per cent hit to GDP over 15 years. It’s already reached 5.5 per cent, according to a study by the Centre for European Reform (CER) think-tank....The CER calculates that Brexit is costing the government £40bn a year in lost revenue, which on ministers’ own figures would allow them to give all public sector workers an inflation-linked pay rise instead of a real-terms cut and still have £12bn to spare. The think tank also cites a very clear Brexit effect on business investment, which hits productivity and therefore the politicians’ holy grail of growth.

John Springford, deputy director for the Centre for European Reform (CER) has used a modelling system from 2018 to look at the difference between the current UK economy outside of the EU compares to a UK which may have stayed in the bloc.He believes the economy is now 5.5% smaller than it would have been if the UK had remained part of the EU.This means the UK’s economic output was £33 billion less than if we had stayed in the EU between April and June alone.

Britain’s GDP was 5.5% smaller by the second quarter of this year than it would have been without Brexit, a think-tank claims.In his analysis for the Centre for European Reform, John Springford also says that almost all the tax increases announced by Rishi Sunak when he was chancellor in March would not have been needed if the UK had enjoyed the extra tax revenue it would have got from higher growth if it had stayed in the EU.